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Firefly  is a TV series that aired in 2002 and 2003 in the United States. The series belongs to the space western subgenre, which allies science fiction and western tropes by layering, in this case, a dystopian society, space travel, standoffs in desolate landscapes, and saloon brawls. This juxtaposition of genres is reflected in the language of  Firefly ’s characters in three ways: world-specific slang, Chinese code-switching, and features evoking Southern American English. This study explores the latter, employing quantitative methods used in variationist sociolinguistics. Using a corpus of all episodes of the series and the film  Serenity  (2005), we show that features reminiscent of Southern varieties of English, specifically nasal fronting and the use of  ain’t , are stratified according to the social realities of the world of  Firefly . Nonstandard linguistic variants are used to represent rebel smugglers as opposed to characters representing valued professions. This pattern contributes to world-building in  Firefly  by indexing divisions between the superpower-controlled territories and the recently settled edge of the universe. The use of realistically constrained Southern linguistic features draws upon present-day notions of linguistic (non)standardness to indicate marginality.  Firefly  therefore relies on its audience’s linguistic knowledge of the real world to create its fictional one.

“So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t , came to find work”: the sociolinguistics of Firefly